“Microcosm of London Plate 22,” Court of Chancery, Lincoln’s Inn Hall during the 19th century. (Wiki-Commons)
Few processes are more tedious to observe yet more consequential in outcome than lawsuits.
If you work in higher education, the pillars of which the Trump administration has threatened to topple by way of grant and funding cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF), two federal institutions vital to medical and scientific research at U.S. universities, that morose statement takes on a sense of urgency bordering on panic. Pile on top of that threat to funding dollars the administration’s challenge to American universities’ non-profit status, an end to which would rearrange the financial ledgers to such an extent that wholesale lay-offs in the world of higher education would ensue, and you have what will amount to institutional melt-down.
The predictable result has been lawsuits and more lawsuits. Prestigious U.S. universities have effectively become legal citadels defending themselves against the administration’s threats to funding that they have relied on for years. Classes, peer-reviewed research, and tenure cases continue. But it would be folly to pretend higher education’s collective eye is blind to the courts or rumors drifting from the office of legal affairs.
The enduring hope is that these cases will be resolved in short order. Or, as The Common Reader’s editor, Professor Gerald Early, put it to the journal’s staff during a recent meeting, “I hope this legal tussle does not go on forever, as it does in Bleak House.”
Charles Dickens’s 1853 novel—his longest and, by most critics’ agreement, also his best—is an attack on the British legal system with one foot in satire, another in the nascent form of a crime novel, and both hands waving in the air to teach us lessons about courtship, secrecy, social justice and, most of all, our expectations about life. It is a lot to chew on, but this being Dickens, and originally written in installments, he manages it all artfully and impressively.
The novel opens in a swirl of London mud, soot, fog, and gas that all settle gradually into the morass of the Court of Chancery, where cases are stretched, dragged, and pulled in so many directions, and for so long, that they devastate and even destroy anyone waiting for a final judgment or simple resolution. Meaning and intent are destroyed as well, such that not even court administrators and judges can trace the origin or reason of the cases they preside over. No one who has ever read this book is surprised to learn that Bleak House was a favorite read of Franz Kafka’s.
Into this environment of legal peril and precious little promise, Dickens pushes Ada Clare and Richard Carstone, two young, hapless lovers who hope to inherit a fortune once their case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce will be resolved at last, after what seems like the passing of generations, at the Court of Chancery. With them on that same ride in expectation of her share in the suit is Miss Flite, a small woman who keeps a room full of birds in cages above an eccentric tinker’s shop in dark, dingy London. Caring for Ada and Richard is John Jarndyce, the Lord of Bleak House and a potential benefactor of the same lawsuit his charges live in expectation of, but which he has chosen to forsake.
For Dickens, who drew his portrait of the Court of Chancery in part from his own experience protecting the artistic rights of A Christmas Carol from cheap, literary knock-offs, the court system was so dreary and destructive that a person was better off avoiding it at all costs.
“The little plaintiff or defendant, who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled, has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world,” Dickens tells us in the first chapter. And also, “[to] those who have contemplated its [Chancery Court’s] history from the outermost circle of such evil, have been insensibly tempted into a loose way of letting bad things alone to take their own bad course, and a loose belief that if the world go wrong, it was, in some off-hand manner, never meant to go right.”
Dickens never posits an alternative to the court system he loathes, except to hint broadly through detailed descriptions of brutal poverty and hardship that people are better off righting the wrongs of social injustice. Triangulating Bleak House and the Court Chancery is London itself, or more commonly the slum of Tom-all-Alone’s, where Jo the young crossing sweeper beats a hardscrabble existence out of himself, indeed beating so hard that he dies about two-thirds of the way into the book.
Richard could simply spend his time with Ada, and they do eventually marry, but mostly on the pretense that the suit of Jarndyce will provide for them, rather than that they provide for themselves by making their own luck and fortune. Mostly, Richard spends his surplus of hours in law offices, where unscrupulous members of the London bar stoke his hopes of a generous settlement, but end up sucking him dry in legal fees. Exhausted and poor, Richard studies law as an amateur to decipher the case himself. When Jarndyce and Jarndyce reaches its final judgment, it ends up consumed by outstanding legal fees, with no money remaining to pay out to anyone.
As Richard nears death, Dickens pulls out all the stops of treacly sentiment that critics never tire of faulting him for. Still, it is hard not to be moved. Richard regrets that he never took John Jarndyce’s advice to forget the lawsuit and instead focus on the larger aspects of life, a life that always called to him but that he never cared to answer.
Jarndyce comforts Richard by reminding him that most people become, at some point, “bewildered” by life’s meaningless, yet powerful, distractions.
Richard answers, “I am very weak, sir, but I hope I shall be stronger. I have to begin the world.”
What that world consists of, Dickens, again, does not spell out. It could be “the other world” the lawsuit’s young plaintiff, mentioned in the first chapter, trots off to when he leaves his rocking horse to ride a real one. But Richard gives us a clue in the book’s penultimate chapter when he cries, just before dying in Ada’s arms, “Not this world, O, not this! The world that sets this right.” It is also upon Richard’s death that Dickens has Miss Flite set her many caged birds free. Has literary symbolism ever been more obvious but also, in a way, glorious?
Richard’s dying words are a mock-heroic pronouncement that fails to satisfy. Clearly, there is no world to set us, or anyone, right. The law speaks. Lawyers work. Everyone waits. And that, Dickens seems to say, is the horror of it all. Richard dies in exhaustion and dashed hopes because he believed in the law far past waiting. The true centerpiece of Bleak House, as everyone knows and Dickens makes plain, is Esther Summerson, who endures both illegitimate status in ruthless Victorian England and smallpox to marry happily and well in the novel’s final pages. She was the lucky one, having no settlements or pronouncements to pin her hopes on. She weighed her own expectations and arguably survived to exceed them.
By the time history is written, the Trump administration may prove far more ruthless than the indifferent malignancy of Dickens’s portrait of Court Chancery. A court of law is not the same as someone who relishes his role as a relentless litigant. As our national landscape becomes consumed and reshaped by hundreds of lawsuits, appeals, and judgements, Dickens’s Bleak House reminds us of the grotesqueries that will be born as a result, but also of the life that survives and waits for us all outside the courtroom.
